Resolution, Sharpness, & Detail

How much do you need and when?

I’m exhausted. The good kind of exhausted. Les and I just wrapped up our 2024 Portfolio Development Workshop. Even though the three days are intense, with work late into the night, and early morning wake-up times, and a massive amount of prep the week before, it’s our favorite workshop to host. The final printed portfolios are amazing to behold due to the tight edits, thoughtful curation, and great stories.

The four participants this year (as usual) had very diverse themes but it’s probably the first time everyone ultimately decided on black & white. The subject matter was journalistic, environmental, a unique take on landscape, and human relationship to the land. The mix of equipment capabilities used for the original photography was all over the map in terms of resolution, optics, and even medium. Three were digital, one was late ‘60s early ‘70s slide film. Optics used were everything from average modern glass to state of the art, to three zone focused consumer compact 35mm film camera. The only thing in common for the equipment used was they were real cameras.

The only images rejected in the editorial process due to image quality were made with a relatively recent iPhone. They weren’t rejected due to some arbitrary technical criteria, they looked lousy with only a moderate bit of stylistic treatment in Lightroom and printed at 13” x 19”.

All of the real camera prints at 13in x 19in were gorgeous and looked great. How can this be? How can a late 1960’s point and shoot with Ektachrome 64 “scanned” with a macro lens and converted to B+W look better than a recent iPhone? I’d say that they were “real world” results instead of perfect condition side-by-side tests. I am not saying that one cannot make a reasonable print with an iPhone in reasonable conditions. I’ve done it but that’s not really the point. The point is more about where and why you made need a lot of resolution, a fantastic lens, and a lot of care to produce fantastic prints.

There was only one case where the stuff we like to obsess over actually mattered. Perfect glass, uber-megapixels, careful focus, good depth of field, and all that stuff mattered only with the participant who had a landscape focused portfolio. Even then exactly half of the final photographs needed all that resolution and sharpness, the other half didn’t. It’s all about context. If you make street or documentary photographs or landscapes that don’t depend on immense amounts of fine detail rendered perfectly then all that image quality stuff doesn’t matter that much. I’ll rephrase that; image quality is far more about the moment, the ability to observe, composition, point of view, and story. One more thing... and that the image doesn’t fall apart tonally with added contrast or density adjustments to a moderate degree.

This is nothing “new”, 35mm film and reasonable focus on an interesting subject can make beautiful, meaningful prints for most subjects. You do not need 4x5 or 8x10 negative resolution for all subject matter, you never did. Even landscape photography doesn’t need a massive amount of fine detail most of the time. Stop worrying about it so much (unless you absolutely need it to tell the story).